Facebook’s Live Videos Are Going to Be More Fun, Find Out How

Facebook, at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal today has unveiled a new feature called "Style Transfer" which allows its users to apply artistic filters to the photos and live videos. According to the tech-giant, this will be an app exclusive feature and is currently in the testing stage in a few countries.

The new feature appears to be somewhat similar to the Prisma app which created a huge buzz when it launched earlier this year. The app allows its users to apply filters to photos and videos thereby giving them an artisitc look.

However, it takes a considerable amount of time, around 15 seconds (or more) to output the image with a selected filter. As of now, it's unclear how Facebook will tackle this issue but training a neural network to run locally on a smartphone without sending the data to servers may "take a lot longer" says Mike Schroepfer, CTO, Facebook.

The company uses a type of AI called deep learning which involves a lot of traning to recreate the artistic effects. As cited on Mashable, "Style Transfer represents just the tip of the iceberg of what's possible" indicating that more and more applications will be powered by AI in the near future.

For the uninitiated, Prisma also uses a similar technology (neural networks) to offer the kind of results it does with its app.

All said and done, the new Style Transfer feature sounds to be quite interesting for it may give your photos or the live videos on Facebook a different angle. There's no information on when this feature will roll out officially. Keep looking at the space for more details.